Black River

Black River
N/A
Metacritic
44
Steam
26.25
xDR
Our rating is calculated based on the reviews and popularity of the game.
Price
$1.39
Release date
4 April 2017
Developers
Publishers
Steam reviews score
Total
44 (49 votes)

Black River is a Survival-Horror RPG worth 3-5 hours of intense gameplay where you ultimately have to turn the table on those who want to harm you. It is not about escaping the village of Black River, it's about putting an end to its misery!

Show detailed description

Black River system requirements

Minimum:

  • OS: Windows XP/Windows Vista/Windows 7/8/10
  • Processor: 1.6 GHz
  • Memory: 128 MB RAM
  • Graphics: DirectX 9.0 Compatible
  • Storage: 200 MB available space
  • Sound Card: DirectX 9.0 Compatible Sound

Recommended:

Recommended requirements are not yet specified.
Updated
App type
Steam APP ID
585090
Platforms
Windows PC
Similar games
Jimmu | 神武
Jimmu | 神武

Action, Adventure, Casual, Indie, RPG, Simulation, Strategy

xDr: 0.00
Putin Life
Putin Life

Action, Adventure, Casual, Indie, RPG, Simulation, Strategy

$0.99 xDr: 72.59
Popularity
Reviews
Write a new review
Obey the Fist!
Obey the Fist!

RPG Maker strikes again!

Black River is one of hundreds of low effort retro-pixel RPG Maker asset/construction kit flips spamming the Steam catalog, made with the RPG Maker video game construction kit... in their own words, "Our easy to use tools are simple enough for a child." Like all RPG Maker "games", this is essentially a bunch of low quality/canned assets from RPG Maker coupled with a cringeworthy high school anime club fan fiction.

As with all RPG Maker games, the poor quality engine displays badly in fullscreen and doesn't have full HD support or any graphics tweaking options, making this unacceptable for any dedicated modern PC gamer. The point can be made that the intention of RPG Maker is to make demos and small games to pass around friends, and shouldn't be used for "professional" game development.

This time Andorlea/Warfare/SimProse/whatever other shell account this guy uses to try hide his identity has once more stamped out a painfully generic copy + paste RPG Maker asset flip. There's a lame "horror" theme tacked onto this one, but it makes no difference really, the "developer" here just dumps these out every couple of weeks with slightly different RPG Maker stock asset skins on them. It's horribly basic, riddled with grammatical and spelling errors, full of stock copy + pasted RPG Maker assets... no real game development has taken place here, this is just a cash grab, it's shovelware polluting Steam for profit.

This "developer" has dumped OVER ONE HUNDRED copy+pasted RPG Maker asset flips onto Steam, and keeps pumping out minimum viable product RPG Maker asset flips as rapidly as possible to try gouge gamers. Over 100 asset flips. It's obvious there's no sincerity here.

We must ask why this ongoing pollution has any serious value for gamers or the gaming industry. This kind of cash grab construction kit shovelware from bad actors like Andorlea gives amateur developers a bad name. This pollution takes marketing space away from genuine indie developers who are doing the right thing, and making real games instead of copying+pasting premade assets in a children's video game construction kit. It makes it harder for gamers to find genuinely made games. This pollution is harmful to Steam, to gamers and the gaming industry.

Like most RPG Maker shovelware and asset flips, the game features extremely low quality copy + pasted 2D retro pixel art, looks awful, and has even worse gameplay. RPG Maker is an absolutely terrible construction kit, and never results in games of any reasonable quality or value to gamers.

You don't have to take my word about how bad the game is, we can measure the interest in a game by how much people bothered to play it. Black River has achievements, and they show us a very clear picture that the game absolutely failed to capture any interest from gamers. The most commonly and easily attained achievement is for talking to one of the first NPCs you meet, trivial to achieve, but less than 2 percent of players bothered to get that far before uninstalling the game. That's a tiny, tiny proportion of gamers who even bothered with this. Ouch.

Reviewing SteamDB to check how popular this game was with players reveals a surprise... there's a very healthy spike in player counts for the game. But this isn't consistent with the achievement stats, that show less than 2 percent of players bothered playing the game for any reasonable amount of time. How is it possible for this game to have so many concurrent players who didn't bother to played the game? Trading cards. People will use card idling software to collect the cards and sell them, but this won't trigger any achievements in-game. That tells us people only really bought this game for trading cards, and that's a damning indictment of the woeful quality. A closer look at the numbers shows the game just has a couple of players every week running up the game and idling it for cards, then deleting it. We must ask how it benefits gamers for there to be so many games like this, with no merit as a serious game, that only generate sales from people idling and selling the trading cards.

Black River has the laughable, eye-watering price of around $5 USD, it's not worth it given the defects and shortcomings with the product, especially considering the sheer number of completely free, much higher quality games on Steam. Gamers who want a good retro JRPG experience would be better off playing the originals, like Final Fantasy, Star Ocean or Chrono Trigger.

Blackjack XIII
Blackjack XIII

This is a truly fun rpgmaker experience. It's rare for horror games to hit the mark quite like Black River does, and it has an excellent quest guide which gives you very clear instructions. There ARE some glitches though.At one point 'Bobby' chased me down on to the pier after i'd come out of the crypt and it reset my progress back to everyone being lvl 1. Fortunately this can be overcome by beating Bobby and phasing through his stunned body. Not an easy feat though but it would've taken about an hour of my progress away.

Astramori Waifu
Astramori Waifu

I played this game for 9 minutes and Bobby has killed me 20+ times.

Bobby, stop. Please.

----------------------------

Originally I couldn't progress as theres no prompt to tell you to run when Bobby the bear is ordered to attack you, so I ended up perpetually stuck fighting him on 1 hp, the game doesn't end when he kills you, its an endless loop and eventually I got curious and walked around with the bear following, I realised eventually I could leave the Inn to progress.. this needed better prompting as I almost totally gave up playing.

The story is pretty confusing so far, something with witches and wizards, zombies and a strange village/town with murder?.. It seems very random currently and as you go through its honestly difficult to know where to go or what to do at several points, you end up having to just wander randomly and hope for the best.

I've written a guide but honestly this game is buggy, doesn't help you find where you need to go and the achievements are broken.

I can't recommend this game.

Scarrab
Scarrab

Like other games by this developer, it's atmospheric and reasonably well made. No random encounters so far, which was nice. It's not easy - I got Game Over'd - but there is an auto save.

The other reviews indicate that the game is severely bug-ridden. That's disappointing. Maybe they got fixed? I guess I'll find out.

I did run into a bug early on and a typo, and it's pretty weird that you can find and equip an item which makes you immune to poison, and then you get poisoned as part of the plot anyway.

Jargonaut
Jargonaut

Here is my 3rd (and final) update.

Previously the game crashed on me twice, after 1 and 5 hours of gameplay.
Each time the game crashed, it also corruptted the gamefile and the only way to proceed with the game is to start from New Game. I have sent details and my gamefile to the developer to fix the problem.

To be fair to the game, I decided to give the game one more try and start from New Game again, after the first 2 crash. I played my 3rd game for another 5 more hours before it crash again. After the crash all the savefiles were again corrupted and I can no longer play the game. Now I already replayed the game 3 times, and all 3 times I had crash and courrpted files. I really think I have been very fair to this game by spending 11 hours on it to make sure that it is really buggy. It is and so far I have been unable to finished the game after 3 tries, so I do not recommend this game at all (even though I loved RPG Maker games and have hundreds of them in my library).

--------------------------------------------------------------------

Here is a second update, written 6 hours after playing the game.

After the crash there was a problem with my game file, and I cannot even load it without it crashing directly. So, I have to start a NEW GAME and was able to play it for 5 hours.

However, after 5 hours I got another crash again, with the same error message (but different line number). As usual, the crash somehow corrupt my game file again, and it cannot be loaded.

I posted screenshots, etc in the game forum.

This is really FRUSTRATING!!!
If I have to restart the game from scratch and lost 5 hours of gameplay, I am done with the game. I just count my $4.89 as a lost cause and do not want to continue with this game. If this game is crashing, it is really not ready to be release. Again, more testing should have been done, and this game really make me disappointed with Aldorlea as a indiscrimate publisher, publishing games without even testing them.

--------------------------------------------------

Here is the first update, written 1 hour after playing the game.

I bought this game, hoping to have a good time.
However, I did not get very far into the game when it crashed with some cryptic error message that says

NoMethodError occurred.
Undefined method "x' for nil:NilClass

Aldorlea, you have been publsihing a lot of games that are very buggy.
You previous games were all high quality but lately the games you published does not seem to be tested and either crashed or have many achievements not working.

Please fixed the bugs, as these games are definitely not worth my $4.89, if it crashed so soon after starting the game!!

Aldorlea, I am very disappointed if you keep on publishing buggy games without making sure that they work.

Sioctan
Sioctan

The visuals are lovely and you can clearly see that it takes a lot of cues from the 16bit JRPG genre. I would just love to play this game and finish the main quest if it didn't crash-all-the-time. Accidentally pressing a button that doesn't have any assignment: crash. Press F12 for a screenshot in steam: restart the game. Look funny: crash.

I would love to see this work, but it doesn't. Please fix these weird crashes and I will replay and recommend this game. :)

inner caster
inner caster

A necromancer put evil infesting the village. Avoid zombies a bit until you reach the mansion. I thought the fountain there couldn’t refill so I was spitting on the dev playing. Then as I cleared the fountain from 2 zombies, I clicked in front of it like all of them!
Calisto will ask the Goddess of Death a favor for his plan but the events will not grant his will.
There’s anguish when you are chased by a bear outside, later on stuck in a maze. You might be frustrated by sticky zombies.
Have a walk by the houses at the left of the inn before the final boss :)
I recommend it but I 'm rather neutral.

The game can be done in 6-10 hours. It’s a parenthesis of Thorne games I didn’t play.

Rammsteniako
Rammsteniako

Spin-off of Thorne series, good stuff! Nice length and of course The Crow :)

8/10

Indigo
Indigo

While it wasn't the worst RPG Maker game I ever played, I still can't recommend it.

The story was really nothing special and I didn't find any of the characters likeable or at least memorable, but it was good enough to keep me going for the five hours it lasted. Well, the ending was underwehlming, like 30 seconds without any closure, so meh.

But what's even worse is the technicals issues. The game froze one time and anothoer five or six times I got an error and it closed itself. I could at least reload and eventually got past the dungeon that caused the issue. And if that wasn't bad enough, some of the achievements seem to be broken.
I don't think that's all right for a game asking a price of 7€. It's ridiculous, because I played better games that were much cheaper or even free. And were working properly, too. So I'd suggest to avoid this game even on sale.

MAJLich
MAJLich

ARG! WHAT THE FREAK! Another game with too many bugs and technical issues! The same thing with Lycan, you Devs did not put the effort in! I played the Thorne series and throughly enjoyed them. The stroyline was well written and you are slowly begining to find out what the tradgedy at Black River. However, the game crashed twice and now I can not continue thew game becasue I can not go to the black temple becasue thegame will not let me enter. Save your money and your time. If these Devs want to half make a game, then save your money! They did not earn it with this game.

That,s about 8 hours I can't get back.

Redrusty66
Redrusty66

good rpgmaker type game, seems to be some tech issues the developers refuse to address with lots of folks, never a good thing for your reputation. They did take the btime to make a card set though which is more than a lot of other devs do. It would be a top notcyuh rpgM title of they would address the tech issues which seem to be the only problem, the game itself seems great.

Victor66
Victor66

This game promised to be scary, but the only thing scary is the character design, as some enemies look rather troubling.
The rest, is a mess:
1. Can't interact with the environment, except chests or highlighted items. No secrets here, sir, no interesting or funny interactions.
2. Story makes little sense, mixing scary town with scary manor with scientific and/or magical experiments that create zombies or something (other monsters aren't explained) with necromancers that cast white magic spells, some sorcerer that wants to gain power somehow, a scary inn with a scary innkeeper that has dark secrets...
3. Monsters don't seem to respawn, but you'll want to kill all of them in order to be of a decent level (most can be avoided) because some fights in the game are very tough.
4. Characters mostly say "..." instead of actually talking and look around a lot, like a bunch of disoriented morrons.
Spoiler

A character gets mauled by a bear and doesn't die and other times gets mauled by a bear and dies and sometimes you lose a fight and die and someother times your health goes to zero after the same enemy catches you on the map, forcing you in a fight over and over again... I have no explanation for this, is just meaningless.

cookiebum
cookiebum

I do like RPGMaker games and this one is alright.
There's some good and some bad so far.
It's crashed a couple of times and I haven't found any secrets or hidden stuff.
I like the story so far and hope it continues to hold my interest

BubblyOasis
BubblyOasis

I hit many game-breaking bugs. I only managed to get around them by saving constantly in multiple files (after each map) and making use of the auto-save feature. When I wasn't dodging bugs, I was furiously grinding at whatever fountain I could find, but even that left me too low-leveled to take on most of the bosses. I did beat it though, finally.

I enjoyed the story, but my victory was spoiled by characters teleporting and appearing where they shouldn't, cut-scenes replaying, and wandering around the map trying to figure out where I was supposed to go next. Thankfully, there was a walkthrough, but I gave up on trying to fight the extra bosses. Even with maxed out healing items, I still couldn't beat them.

Hawk Zombie
Hawk Zombie

The final boss is an unbalanced mess. Grinding for levels is also painfully slow.

quizicalgin
quizicalgin

TL;DR:I will say this. Just don't buy this, it's not worth the money on sale. Even if you only spent a penny on it, you would want that penny back.

Pros:

-Graphics are alright since they mainly use the RTP or objects derived from it.

-Some of the monsters concepts, while not new, are interesting to see in rpg maker.

Cons:

-The fights are punishingly hard for a majority of the game. There's fun hard and then there's bashing your head against the wall in a fight of attrition hard. This is the latter. Only after the lady raider earns the arrow attack that hits all enemies twice does the game become bearable.

-Characters are just bland. They're all very flat with the only one being vaguely developed is Thorne but even he comes off as "generic edgy rogue #3005798782"

-Story. What the fuck even is it? First we're saving one character, then another, then we have to save Thorne (which outside of the one character all the others hate/fear him so???), and then we have to save the world from a mad necromancer? I mean outside of the one character dragging everyone else along to save Thorne there's no real reason to do anything? The story is barely held together and there's no real motivation keeping the characters there.

-Glitches/Terrible eventing everywhere.

+The maze with the girl and dogs getting stuck, the dogs just end up ignoring the light mechanic altogether.

+The docks north of where Bobby and the innkeeper are. If you run up them later in the game it reactivates the cut scene with the lady bandit, starting you over with just the one character back at level 1! That even should have been turned off. Bobby also respawns in that area and I can't tell if that's on purpose or not.

+Leaving the dark maze will have you pop up outside the room where the scorpions flooded out to attack the player.

-Difficult story progression, and I mean this in that a lot of times the game doesn't tell you where to go. At all. So you're left wandering around with the monsters just whittling you down.

-Items are basically useless. They only heal maybe 20-30% of your health, and at later levels you're just shoving Skyrim levels of food into the characters to keep them alive. Add on the hard fights and you're basically running low on health items at all times. The merchant fixes this as you can FINALLY buy and sell the shit you've collected the past 4 hours or so. You've also got more than enough gold to spare.

-Bad maps. They look pretty but are very badly designed to where it's hard to tell where you're supposed to go. I almost gave up at the ending because I didn't know I was supposed to go to the left of the in because there's a path there. There is NOTHING there to indicate that. No path, no sign, nothing.

>>>e
>>>e

I hit 'Page Up' and made the game crash to desktop.

A broken mess, I'm surprised it's not been taken off of Steam yet. Not been tested at all extensively should probably be taken off the store with how broken it is.

Darth Raven
Darth Raven

this game is horribly unbalanced. It looks like the devs didn't even bother with playtesting this thing before release. It's heavy grind since the beginning, or you're pretty much toast after an hour.